Going into the night

“YOU’VE STAYED in this place too long, and there is no health in you. In the name of God, go.”

It was not President Aquino who lobbed that barb at Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez. With that stinging order, Oliver Cromwell sent England’s “Rump Parliament” packing in 1653.

Gutierrez didn’t tarry to discover if an impeachment court would slam her with a 21st-century version of “Ironside” Cromwell’s boot. The lady instead jettisoned months of fire-breathing defiance. At a hastily cobbled Malacañang meeting Friday, she informed the President that she would go, to swipe a line from poet Dylan Thomas, “gentle into that good night.”

As P-Noy watched, Gutierrez signed her quit letter. “I am resigning my office effective May 6,” the key sentence read. The rest is blather about national interest. “Even as a private citizen, I will still support efforts of government in stamping out corruption.”

Until Friday’s meeting, “Gutierrez refused to go quietly into the night,” Viewpoint noted in “Toga or no toga.” (Inquirer, 3/29/11) “If presidents or ombudsmen cannot be virtuous, then the threat of impeachment should, at least, make them nervous.”

Indeed, there was much to fidget about. Aside from a steep drop in conviction rates, “performance and trust were undermined by the ombudsman’s action—or inaction—on high-profile cases,” the Philippine Human Development Report noted.

Embalmed cases included the Commission on Elections’ P2-billion purchase of automated election counting machines from Mega Pacific; former Justice Secretary Hernando Perez’s $2-million bribery case; Jocelyn Bolante’s P728-million fertilizer fund scam and the $328-million NBN-ZTE broadband deal.

Add to that the “euro generals scam” and murder of Ensign Philip Pestaño roundly trashed by the UN Commission on Human Rights. Political interests of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her consort were intertwined in these cases.

“The ombudsman’s slide in performance and credibility [stems] from the undoing of the very reforms [instituted by Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo] that previously strengthened the organization,” the PHDR adds.

Yet, few realized how jittery Gutierrez had become. Why?

Her spokespersons masked the crumbling of Gutierrez’s bulwarks. So did the strident defense of Gutierrez by Arroyo partisans, like Representatives Simeon Datumanong, Mila Magsaysay and allies. Arm-twisting by religious and other groups was hush-hush. Iloilo’s Rep. Niel Tupas Jr. identified the Iglesia ni Cristo as one such lobby.

“Straws and feathers tell us from which point of the compass the wind comes,” the old proverb says. Gutierrez’s newspaper column “The Essential” provided subtle signals. These were overlooked.

“There is much darkness for me now, despite the brave front I construct,” she wrote a few days before bailing out. “‘Resignation is supposedly the better of few options available to me today.” And she fretted over “the shame of being the first ombudsman to have been forcibly removed from office.”

One can sympathize with this personal anguish. In the event, Gutierrez tossed in the towel barely a week before senators, clad in magenta-colored togas set off by gold sashes, were to begin hearings on the Articles of Impeachment. These were transmitted earlier by a lopsided House vote of 212 to 46.

“An overwhelming vote amounts to a ‘censure’ or ‘soft impeachment’,” former Sen. Rene Saguisag wrote in the San Beda Law Journal four decades back. That makes “trial and conviction superfluous.”

An ombudsman can lose moral authority “to be credible, acceptable, legit and effective,” he stressed in this 20-page essay. “Resignation may be the patriotic option.”

Gutierrez has been subjected to “trial by publicity over the past year,” former President Arroyo insisted. “We respect her decision to resign.”

Look beyond the rhetorical hand-wringing, former Special Prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio suggested. Evidence at an impeachment would have led beyond Gutierrez to former President Arroyo’s doorsteps. “Resignation is a strategic move of survival on the part of GMA.” The former president bought time. She refuses to go into the night, just yet.

Scuttling of the trial regrettably denies to citizens an invaluable tutorial on governance in start-to-finish media coverage. Reportage on the aborted Joseph Estrada impeachment “gave the public a gripping education in democracy,” Inquirer’s Conrado de Quiros insists. Price tags fail to capture the value of such instruction.

At the tailend of Aniano Desierto’s watch, only 5 percent trusted the Office of the Ombudsman. That soared to 28 percent, following reforms instituted by Simeon Marcelo. (Revelations of Armed Forces comptroller sleaze, for example, came from Marcelo’s fielding of now COA Commissioner Heidi Mendoza.)

Under Gutierrez, that trust rating plummeted to 4 percent in 2009. It has probably crashed through the floor, since the scandal of Armed Forces comptroller plea bargains and House Resolution 1089 on impeachment. Gutierrez exits from a gutted institution.

We were had twice by flawed ombudsmen. This battered nation simply cannot afford a third screw-up.

The President ought to invite the broadest participation of civil society and religious groups in picking the next ombudsman. And whoever is chosen must, as a first task, bring closure to all those pickled cases—even if the trail results, as many foresee, in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo finally going into the night.

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